Latest / You've Been Heard / 333- Optimizing Your Legacy Telecom with Darin Ward: Consolidating Systems, Cutting Costs, and Enabling the Business

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333- Optimizing Your Legacy Telecom with Darin Ward: Consolidating Systems, Cutting Costs, and Enabling the Business · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: Welcome everyone back to dissecting popular 18 nerds. We have definitely one nerd on the call today and his name is Darren Ward. And I say that and I mean that with all respect because if I called myself a nerd that would mean that I would be calling myself smart somehow. And he does believe that we landed on the moon. And I'm not saying that we didn't. Not saying that we didn't. And I just like talking about this subject because it's. It fascinates me. And we ended up like, you know, one of my last episodes. We. It took all the way to the end of the episode to start talking about this. But let's just start with a statistic. Okay.223 assault rifle. The bullet leaves the muzzle of the gun at 3,000 to 3,500ft per second. The reason why I say that is because that is the speed of a bullet and we've heard this term before. Faster than a speeding bullet. What else is faster than a speeding bullet? The. I think it's the F15 fastest airplane goes maybe something like Mach 5.2. That would be 5200ft per second. How fast was the lunar triangular. We don't call it the command capsule. When it re entered Earth's atmosphere after doing a 440. 440,000 440, hundred thou. Can I speak English? You got four zero and then three more zeros mile round trip around the moon reentered the Earth's atmosphere. How fast was it going? The reported number is a little bit more. It's. It's 36,000ft per second again. Mach 5.2 5,200ft per second. Capsule blunted backwards triangular object entering the earth's atmosphere a little bit under 37,000ft per second. That is the exact number by the way is 121 0.01 football fields per second. 121 football fields per second. We're just going to leave it with that. We'll start with the conspiracy theories. Do you believe them or not? I went down a dark hole recently of reading about space travel and landing on the moon because it is quite insane when you really break it down math wise and science wise on how we did that and the fact that it was in 1967 or 69.
• 2:50
  Speaker B: I was thinking 70, but I don't.
• 2:53
  Speaker A: Know what kind of telecom.
• 2:55
  Speaker B: I think 69.
• 2:56
  Speaker A: And since we're both ex. Well, not really X. You're never an ex telecom nerd. But since we're both telecom guys and what started this whole thing was I saw a picture of President Nixon. What started my whole, like, you know, because I'm not a big conspiracy guy. I may. You have to take what is apparent. And you know, and you know, you don't start with conspiracy. You know what I mean? Like you take what is in parent. What is apparent apparent is we were told we land on the moon. Okay, now let's break it down. But what started this whole thing was a picture of President Nixon on a telephone speaking to people on the moon. And that was 1969. And me knowing. Being in telecom, you being in telecom, we know that we play with things like jitter and latency. Now that we've got voip right. Back in the day, certainly back then. And who was it that made the. Who was it that reached out and touched someone, as you'd like to say, I believe, which was at and T. Right. Was that their thing? Reach out and touch someone anyway.
• 4:03
  Speaker B: Someone.
• 4:03
  Speaker A: I remember that whatever it was, it's att, right. Was the one that switched that phone call from the Oval Office to then, I don't know, to Houston and then to the men on the moon. So what kind of technology did we have back then and how did that phone call get made? Any clue? Being a telecom guy?
• 4:20
  Speaker B: Analog only. Right.
• 4:22
  Speaker A: Fascinating.
• 4:23
  Speaker B: It is.
• 4:24
  Speaker A: We'll leave everyone. We'll leave everyone with that. The. This is. Well, we'll dedicate this episode to telecom. How many end users do you manage a phone system for?
• 4:37
  Speaker B: We. The company has 30,000 employees or so. We've got like 10,000 in the U.S. not everyone has a phone right now. We've certainly got, you know, shop floor workers and that sort of thing. So I'm not finished with my centralization project just yet, but I think we'll land somewhere between 8 and 6 and 8,000.
• 5:01
  Speaker A: I like how you said that centralization. The centralization, not unification. Right. Because there's all these buzzwords. We could play a telecom acronym. We should do a telecom acronym section of things that probably a lot of IT guys that are listening to the show have no clue when they. Telecom guy. And we talk all different level of acronyms. But what's move ad changes like in your organization? Do you get a lot of those?
• 5:26
  Speaker B: So absolutely. And, and I've seen a significant reduction in those types of activities since moving to the cloud. We certainly still have. I think I've got about 30 systems left that I need to migrate.
• 5:44
  Speaker A: 30 PBX. PBX like five.
• 5:47
  Speaker B: I have about. I have about 15 or so I'd say about 15 legacy PBXs, Mitel and then all of the. I've seen, I've seen them all. Yep. Nortel Northstar. Oh nice. Avaya. Yeah, for sure.
• 6:08
  Speaker A: Microwaves sitting on the wall.
• 6:10
  Speaker B: Yeah. And some of them are refrigerators. Huge, you know, three stack refrigerators, you know, with a big power supply in.
• 6:18
  Speaker A: The bottom, dare I say it? Silos. Silos, we call them silos. I think they still exist. And I'm doing a, I'm actually, I've been putting together a telecom training program behind the scenes offline and I have to do like a history, like a little bit of history of telecom and stuff that you, you know, you probably won't run into anymore. But you know, I have to basically go through a glossary and a definition and you know, key systems in there. Pbx. How do you describe what a PRI is and sip trunking and, and in my head I'm thinking, is it really worth even spending a lot of time teaching someone what a key system in a PRI is like? Yeah, but they're probably going to run into it. In your case, how many old, how many old North Stars you still think are kicking around out there making phone.
• 7:11
  Speaker B: Calls, extension dialing, Outside my organization, you know, I would imagine because the old mantra is if it's not broke, don't fix it. And there's still a lot of the older generation that says show me the value of migrating to something that I suddenly have to stress over. You know, the network is down all the time guys. I don't want to put my phones on the network. So that old guard is still out there.
• 7:42
  Speaker A: It's hard. Well, it's hard and easy to hack one, Right? Easy meaning you could, if you know a little bit about star codes and you know, admin resets and things like that, you could probably hack a North Star phone system, probably fairly EAS and. But if you did, what could you do with it? Forward calls to a calling card, server calls. What could you do?
• 8:08
  Speaker B: About 10 years ago, about 10 years ago, I read an article about a guy who was facing charges. This guy was blind, he was born blind. And he made it a career of hacking phone systems. That's all he did. And he hacked phone systems back in the day to basically create calling cards. The calling cards were expensive.
• 8:34
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 8:34
  Speaker B: So he'd create a calling card and sell them and that evolved into social engineering and he got really, really good at being able to, you know, read somebody's tone and you know, convince them to do something for him, whatever it was. So he was up on charges and.
• 8:52
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 8:52
  Speaker B: I think he had to kind of come clean in order to reduce those charges.
• 8:56
  Speaker A: Yep. What was he doing with all the money, I wonder?
• 9:00
  Speaker B: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I think he had a brother and a couple of friends helping him by the end, you know, once he proved he could be successful.
• 9:09
  Speaker A: So we can still hack. So there's a reason to change. You've got an old pbx, but then it's also just as easy to hack, probably like the newer. It's probably just as easy to hack a new voicemail system. And I know this because I am friends with, work with and know the kind of true story behind the scenes inside the telecom industry. And you've called Customer Care many times. I know a lot of the IT directors, managers, CTO, CIOs have called customer Care as well. And how easy is it to get someone to just give you information when you call your vendor? Sure, yeah, I need my IP address. Can you give that to me real quick? Yeah, sure.
• 9:46
  Speaker B: Depending on who you get. You know, banks have rules as well. You know, you do not share this information or whatever. And I know somebody who convinced a bank teller over the phone to put her name on somebody else's bank account as joint owners and then she drained it.
• 10:05
  Speaker A: Oh my Lord.
• 10:06
  Speaker B: And this was just a couple of years ago.
• 10:08
  Speaker A: That reminds me of Microsoft calling my dad and telling him that his computer has been compromised. And Steve, Steve from Microsoft. Eventually my dad, he doesn't, he has dementia, so he forgets. Fully functioning, 87 year old man, right? Can still drive like, passes the driver's test like flying colors, right. But then won't remember where he is. So that's, that's the problem with the driving is you can't, you can fool the DMV and they'll pass you, but, but what they won't test him is, is drive them somewhere, go back to the DMV and have him come back to the dmv. He'll forget and he'll drive somewhere else. So he actually had someone convince him he remembered at one time as a dad, Microsoft never call you, don't give him any information, stop paying him $600 to clean up your computer and make it faster. There's nothing wrong. Like, don't know, people aren't, you know, there's just, there's no reason to do this. But. So he eventually remembered one time when the guy called him, he's like, no, my Son told me, like, you know, you know, like, whatever. And the guy was like, oh, well, fine. How about this then? I'll pay you. I'll pay you, Dr. Howard, to 500, $600 a month. I just need a bank account in the United States to be able to receive payments. And if you do that for me, I will pay you $600 a month.
• 11:36
  Speaker B: Sure.
• 11:36
  Speaker A: Sounds great. Sounds great. So what happened was. And you know, you know, I'm not. This is. I don't want to. I love my father and all the respect in the world. You know what I mean? This is just. This is for learning. For learning, you know, purposes. I guess the he. He did. We did end up find. He did. He got lost on the way to the bank. He got to the bank, but he was opening up an account, but then he couldn't. He. He forgot why he was there or something. And, you know, the police called the house and they said, hey, you know, we've got Dr. Howard down here. He's, you know, he's trying to. He went to, like, a bank. Normally he goes to the bank that's like half an hour away. Well, he. He drove by that one and ended up like an hour and a half away at the next, you know, bank of America trying to open up an account. Yeah, he said he's going into business. He's got to open up an account for this guy. And we stopped him in time. But he was about give the accounting number and routing number to this guy, and I'm sure the guy would have paid him, but then he would have been, you know, caught for money laundering or something.
• 12:39
  Speaker B: Right.
• 12:40
  Speaker A: Because I look at where. So basically we. We changed my dad's phone number, right. So the guy can stop calling him. Because. Yeah, human. What did you call it earlier? Like, human hacking.
• 12:50
  Speaker B: Social engineering.
• 12:51
  Speaker A: Social engineering, Right. So the guy is very good at calling. And me being the telecom guy, I eventually entered the phone. Hey, how you doing? Yeah, yeah. I'm glad that you're helping my dad out. I tried to, like, you know, a sting operation. You. I'm glad you're helping my dad. It's great, you know. Oh, where are you at? Oh, you're over here, right? What do you, you know, I'm in telecom. What are you doing? Vonage, you know, and come to find out, no, he's not in Texas. He is in India. He is using vonage to sift through numbers. Then he started asking me, well, I'm having troubles with some SIP providers. Can you help me do this?
• 13:21
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
• 13:21
  Speaker A: I'm trying to like, you know, what's your address in India? I was literally going to get on a plane and go over there and strangle the guy. And then I realized, well, now it might be part of a different, you know, more corrupt organization. And then I end up, you know, disappearing somewhere in a dumpst. This is where my mind goes. Anywho, the, that's a slight telecom social engineering story. So I told, we changed the phone number so they can't call the guy. What does he do? He sends him certified mail from Microsoft.
• 13:49
  Speaker B: Oh wow.
• 13:50
  Speaker A: Call us right now. Your computer has been, we've been trying to get a hold of you. We've been trying to get a hold of you. You've been compromised. Give, give Microsoft a call right now. Here's the toll free number. So then when he calls him back, now he's got his number again. Then I gotta change his phone number again. So it's, this is the cycle. This is the cycle. So we literally have people like at the house. If you see anything come from Microsoft, destroy it immediately. Do not let him, do not let him open, do not let him open the envelope.
• 14:16
  Speaker B: Right.
• 14:18
  Speaker A: Because you know the troubles of changing a phone number and I mean to a degree. So talk to me. What. Let's, let's go down the Tales from the 66 block. Tales from the 66 block. Worst Telecom Nightmare that you've ever experienced. Experience somewhere in the near future probably has something to do with a provider screwing something up.
• 14:38
  Speaker B: Ah, the worst early. So there's a few to choose from. Right. So I don't know that this ranks among the worst but early in my career we had pure analog services and we wanted a PRI circuit for quite a long time, but they weren't, they weren't available on our side of the railroad tracks. Yes, finally they became, they became available.
• 15:06
  Speaker A: There's T1 pairs now.
• 15:08
  Speaker B: Right, right. So, so we had like, I don't know, eight or nine, you know, did trunks and then our, our outward trunks, outbound trunks. And so I finally partnered up with a clec, gave us great pricing, put the whole project together. Right.
• 15:27
  Speaker A: Who was the last mile at and T last month?
• 15:29
  Speaker B: Verizon, I believe. West at the time. U.S. west.
• 15:35
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 15:36
  Speaker B: Yeah. So this was in Colorado. So we're coming up, you know, so here we are this week we're going to actually turn up. You know, we've got the hardware in place, TN22, 24 or something like that. And unfortunately the carriers break up an order into several orders. So there's an order to take down the dids, there's an order to install the span, there's an order to turn up the span. There's an order to take down your old outbound trunks. You know, it's all broken up. They do them out of order, so they take down my ID IDs before porting my DID phone numbers over to the T1, and we're down for an entire week.
• 16:29
  Speaker A: Oh, wait, was it. Why couldn't they. Is it because.
• 16:33
  Speaker B: Why couldn't they restore them? What a reasonable question, Phil. Yeah, it's because.
• 16:38
  Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. Reasonable.
• 16:40
  Speaker B: Because dids were a premium product at the time. The DID trunks and the DID trunks at the central office had already been assigned to a new customer.
• 16:54
  Speaker A: Oh, snap back, please. Yeah, people don't.
• 17:00
  Speaker B: I wonder if anyone. Obviously, you know, we're working with the CLEC at the time, and they scramble, you know, their VPs, they come drive all the way to Greeley, Colorado, and talk to, you know, my director and really. Yeah. You know, apologize profusely. But they cannot, you know, they cannot accelerate the timeline of the rest of the orders with US west and get our PRI turned up.
• 17:29
  Speaker A: Yeah, nice. Greely. You know what that. You know what that. All of that. There's a couple things that come up. I went to csu, so right next to Greeley, there's four common memories that you have in Greeley. As you're driving to Greeley, you roll up the windows and it does nothing. Does absolutely nothing. Because you see that brown cloud coming. You see that brown cloud coming. Anyone that knows knows there's people that live in Greeley. And I remember my friend who lived in Loveland, Colorado, who was right next door. He's like, oh, we knew the Greeley kids in the school bus because that's where they slaughter all the cows. And it smells. It just. It's just. It's just manure. Okay.
• 18:07
  Speaker B: Yeah. Some people call it Stinky Town.
• 18:09
  Speaker A: Second thing is Children of the Corn, I believe, is where that was based. So it goes hand in hand with your chat with your telecom nightmare.
• 18:17
  Speaker B: It was filmed there.
• 18:19
  Speaker A: I don't know if it was filmed there or based on that. That location. I just heard something about Children of the Corn and where it was. Now we need to Google this because it could be an urban legend. I could just be making stuff up and then, you know, I don't know. Yeah, you do. Dissecting popular IT nerds gets taken down because they misquoted Children of the Corn being Filmed somewh. And then there was something about the Chupacabra, I believe, where I used to work, because I worked for Quest Wireless back in the day doing premier support, which was one of the best, most fun college jobs ever. Children of the Corn. So anyways, keep going. So, well, no, let me ask this. What kind of phone calls were coming in to your desk or office or what kind of things were people saying to you? What was going on?
• 19:11
  Speaker B: Yeah, so everybody was fairly nice about it except for my boss. My boss, unfortunately, you know, kind of ruled with an iron fist. And you know her. Her way of managing people was to slam her hand down on the desk louder than last time. So it did not go well. Apparently. I was told many years later that she actually went to HR to try to fire me. And HR said, you cannot do that. This was not his fault. You know, once they got, you know, the entire story. Yeah.
• 19:53
  Speaker A: So Movie History, 1989, a movie that held great promise but fell apart, was entirely filmed in Greeley and Weld county using North Colorado Medical Center. Now this. I got to make sure that this is the correct movie. I could just be filming any other. Nope. This was a water war in Spudville. This is the. It's from Die Hard to. Anywho I believe it was ended up being Nebraska. Anywho, I know that it supposedly took part in Nebraska anyways, which is where my wife's from. And I'm learning a little bit more about this, which is great because now I can tell her, great, you know, what's in Nebraska? Oh, we have something now. So. So you got. Tried to get fired for telecom. So. So we still. No one has gotten fired for choosing att. Is that true or. No?
• 20:47
  Speaker B: That is still the fact. For sure. There was. Yeah, you. But don't people.
• 20:54
  Speaker A: Don't people hate AT and T or. I mean, and I'm not saying. And I have a lot of ATT friends, a lot of ATT circuits out there that are live right now, probably doing perfectly well.
• 21:04
  Speaker B: Right, Right. Another memory.
• 21:07
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 21:09
  Speaker B: Of another telecom engineer and I put together an rfp. And our boss at the time was getting her mba, so she was learning all about, you know, scoring and RFPs and, you know, the entire process.
• 21:24
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 21:24
  Speaker B: And. And then she learned weighted averages. So, you know, we evaluated a solution. I don't even remember what it was for at the time, but another vendor clearly won out, and AT&T ranked third on our scorecard.
• 21:44
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 21:45
  Speaker B: And then she sat down with us and suddenly, you know, as any good statistician can do started assigning different weights to different scores and halfway through I could tell that she had already done the exercise. And so she asked us all the leading questions and well, you know, does this particular FE meet the minimum requirement.
• 22:11
  Speaker A: Are you saying to the RFP numbers she.
• 22:14
  Speaker B: She totally made AT and T come out on top. And then a couple of years later she admitted that she was politically motivated. Interesting award it to really no serious.
• 22:30
  Speaker A: That never happens in telecom. There's no, there's. That never happens in telecom. There's no, there's no pockets being lined or whatever we call that telecom still the wild wild west. It's like back in the day that used to happen in pharmaceuticals. And then they realized that they were playing with people's lives and wonder if that's still. You know, there's. We're not going to go down that route.
• 22:52
  Speaker B: Yeah, we better not.
• 22:54
  Speaker A: We're not going down that route because of where this podcast gets mostly distributed and but that in telecom it's a little bit different. There's still sales reps. There's still maybe some over embellishing of facts from time to time. There might be a. We have. This is the latest and greatest and best but in reality maybe. Oh, here's what I heard one time. I think you'll get a kick out of this. We're not voiceover ip. We're way ahead of times. We're beyond voiceover ip. We are voiceover PI.
• 23:33
  Speaker B: Voiceover PI.
• 23:35
  Speaker A: We heard voiceover PI. And you know what that was? We're not voiceover Internet protocol because voiceover Internet protocol is not secure. That's going voice over the Internet. In other words, voice over the public Internet.
• 23:47
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 23:47
  Speaker A: We're VoiceOver PI. We're VO P. We're VO P. VoiceOver Private Internet.
• 23:54
  Speaker B: Oh, your Internet's private now.
• 23:57
  Speaker A: And really what that was was we can't deliver our. What was it? Gen Band. We can't deliver our. Our version of. Remember Gen Band.
• 24:10
  Speaker B: It's a name.
• 24:11
  Speaker A: Gen Band was like before like Broadsoft. So a lot of the Broadsoft providers before had Gen Band. Okay. And you'll know it. You'll. You'll always know if you hear the Gen Band hold music. I wish I could just play that. I can find it probably. Gen Band Hold Music. Anywho, so what basically what they were, what they were selling and over hyping was all of our servers are in one data center and we have to sell you an MPLS circuit or an OnNet VPN circuit, aka T1 back to the data center, aka private Internet, where voiceover private so that your phone calls stay up. But in reality you're now single. Threaded. If that T1 goes down, all of your voice goes down. All of your traffic has to first travel to that data center, then go out to the PSTN end. But the way that it was being sold was really just kind of a crock of crap. I mean like we're voiceover private Internet, we're not voice.
• 25:12
  Speaker B: You know what I mean?
• 25:13
  Speaker A: Like, that was like. Is that of hilariousness?
• 25:16
  Speaker B: Is that the product that they put on the AT&T1NET bill? No. Are you familiar with the OneNet? So I have, I have an AT&T bill. It used to be about 2,000 pages long. I've got it down, you know, as I migrate my systems over, I've got it down to. I think I'm somewhere around 400 pages now. But they sold us and this was actually, I think before I was on the team, many moons ago, they sold us something. That sounds just like it. It echoes what you're saying here.
• 25:54
  Speaker A: Well, I mean, I'm sure many people did the same thing.
• 25:56
  Speaker B: Like every time we turn up an office, we order phone numbers, we give those numbers to AT and T, they put them in their database, they deliver a dedicated T1 and they give us on Net to on net pricing, you know, from site to site.
• 26:12
  Speaker A: I'm sure a lot of people were doing it and selling it in this fashion because the Internet had not been built for QoS yet. This was back at the beginnings of VoiceOver IP. Right? Now they build the Internet for QoS, right? You don't, you can't even get a home even just at home. Like you don't, you can Turn on your QoS settings on your Comcast router or whatever at home, right? The Internet's built for this type of stuff. Now back in the day it wasn't so. And everyone was skeptical of VoIP. Remember back in the day, I was like, no, VoIP is the enemy. You're going to call quality was bad. Everyone was always talk about no way call quality, this, that and everything else. You don't really talk too much about that anymore. And that might be because people don't even care too much about phones anymore. There's, there's a whole. We could debate over, you know, why do people, you know, whatever, just, you know, not care so much about it anymore. But it was, they had to deliver these point to point T1 so they could make sure that their customers, you Know, had quality phone service, but it ended up being way overpriced. It certainly was not redundant or did not carry with it a disaster avoidance type of. I mean, you could just order a secondary T1, I guess. But we know that in their rack in the data center, which I know right where it is, that that could go down. Or, you know, these are the things that you used to experience back in the day. So, oh, the local engineer made an update or a change took down the entire voice network. All customers are down. Right. So that's one thing that could happen, that would go wrong. The T1 could go down, that could go wrong. The provider could go down, that would take you out. Then there could just be over subscription or they didn't do the math right. And you've got, you know, 50 people on a 1 point, you know, 1.5 or 1.2 megs of, you know, voice quality. So now we're gonna, I don't know, you know, what was it? G7, 11 and G7. I don't even remember the old codex, right. Like, you know, I mean, okay, so.
• 28:16
  Speaker B: We'Ll now work 722, 726.
• 28:18
  Speaker A: So now we'll compress voice to get more phone calls on it. So, so it was actually back in the day, there was a lot of things that could go wrong with your voice and people really started to hate telecom because of all of that. But, yeah, look up the Gen Band hold music. Everyone will know you still run into it. Then you call the, you know, the, I don't know, some airplane provider or something. You know, you'll hear that. You'll hear the, you'll hear the hold.
• 28:45
  Speaker B: Music, but I'm sure I'll recognize it.
• 28:48
  Speaker A: So what did you do before the invention of the Internet as a child?
• 28:55
  Speaker B: I was a poor country boy.
• 28:58
  Speaker A: Those are the ones that have the most fun.
• 29:00
  Speaker B: So, yeah, I was a poor country boy. But my dad had the foresight to get me a Commodore Vic 20 in the 80s.
• 29:08
  Speaker A: Nice.
• 29:09
  Speaker B: He just knew that, you know, one day I remember him telling friends, one day every home will have a computer in it. Oh, no, Ronnie, you're, you're, you're smoking crack. No. One day every computer will have a. Every home will have a computer in it. So he wanted to give his boy a head start.
• 29:26
  Speaker A: So, yeah, it's. You're not the first person to say that. You're not the first person to say I was a poor country boy, that my dad bought me a Commodore. And I believe that everyone's first computer at least within our age. I mean, the people that are above the. The people that are one step above punch cards, but one step below 386. Well, we'll say Pentium. Pentium. If your first computer was a pen team, it doesn't count. Okay. 80% of you guys either had. You either had a Commodore or you had.
• 29:54
  Speaker B: Or a Candy.
• 29:56
  Speaker A: Yeah. Or an Apple. I would say you had an Apple, Apple IIC, Apple 2e. That was the computer, though. That was the computer. Okay, so, but what did you do before that? Did you hit bail hay?
• 30:09
  Speaker B: I actually did.
• 30:11
  Speaker A: I bailed hay, too. This is so weird.
• 30:13
  Speaker B: I did. So my. One of my first jobs, I get a call, you know, from some stranger. He's like, hey, I got a truck of. Hey, I'll pick you up tomorrow. And, you know, so and so gave me your number. I'm like, yep, you got it. So I met him. I unloaded a semi truck of hay in an afternoon. He paid me four bucks an hour.
• 30:39
  Speaker A: That's pretty good, actually. That's not bad thinking.
• 30:44
  Speaker B: I thought it should have been more. I thought I got.
• 30:46
  Speaker A: Well, yeah, because you were doing. Hey, you weren't sitting there, you know, data entry. You were unloading a semi truck.
• 30:53
  Speaker B: Right. I mean, this guy got a low boy. I mean, this lowboy was stacked, unloaded for 24 bucks. And I walked away thinking, I've just learned my first lesson on negotiations.
• 31:09
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 31:10
  Speaker B: And figure out the pricing upfront.
• 31:12
  Speaker A: And I will not do this for a living. Growing up.
• 31:15
  Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, it certainly motivated me. I mean, now being a country boy, though, I mean, most. I don't know, a country boy who's, you know, not afraid of work, so. But I didn't know what I wanted to do. I did not know what I wanted to do. So I joined the Navy and, you know, told the detailer, you know, this is what I want to do, and this is where I want to go. Send me far, far away. So he's like, japan. I'm like, sounds good.
• 31:43
  Speaker A: Does sound kind of cool. Yeah.
• 31:45
  Speaker B: I actually enjoyed it. Yeah. You know, so I was stationed for two years. I was stationed out of Japan on. On an aircraft carrier. Got my Japanese driver's license, learned a little bit about the language. You know, just enough to ask for directions and get around. I didn't really have a knack for it. But have you gotten to.
• 32:06
  Speaker A: Have you ever gotten to fly in a plane, like a real fighter jet plane?
• 32:10
  Speaker B: No.
• 32:11
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 32:12
  Speaker B: No. But I did get to ride in a helicopter.
• 32:15
  Speaker A: I'm just trying to tie it back to 37,000 mile feet per second just trying to. Just try to tie it back to. Have you traveled at 5,000ft per second? Because 37,000ft per second trying to tie this all back together. But it didn't happen. So the. Let me ask you this. There's other organizations out there right now that are struggling, and I can think of a few of them off the top of my head and that are near and dear to my heart, because I know the VP of it. I know the directors of it, and they say things to me like this, word for word. Phil, I want you to imagine my job like this. I'm a forest fighter. I'm a forest fire fighter. Firefighter. Okay? And I'm fighting a forest fire. I'm in the midst of a forest fire right now. There's fires everywhere. I mean, I am in the middle of this thing. I can see fires a mile away. I am only concerned with the fire that is lighting my leg on fire right now. I'm only concerned with putting that one out right now. So that's their life. And they have, would you say 30,000 end users that you have? These guys have around 60. I would say 60,000. They have. No, no, no. Globally, like 300 to 400,000 users.
• 33:42
  Speaker B: Sure.
• 33:43
  Speaker A: But within the United States and Mexico and Canada and stuff like that, I would say, you know, 100 to 120,000. Okay. PBX is everywhere right now. Ringing. There is a PBX somewhere ringing right now. There's an Avaya Phones handset ringing somewhere right now. There's probably a Mitel one ringing. There's an nec. There's a Toshiba. There's a. Come on, let's give me some more.
• 34:08
  Speaker B: There's a North Star, Cisco and Calm Dial and Panasonic.
• 34:12
  Speaker A: Calm down. Love it. Some other weird ones that you run into. Yeah. And they're all working. They're on. They're getting a weird bill probably sent to them in a. On a. On a. On. On a pallet, you know, gets forklifted off a pallet. That's their phone bill. And, yeah, they're managing all of that. And they're just going about it. And they're. They're. They're asking. I would say every two to three months, I get a phone call that's like, okay, what about this? What if we did it this way? What if we did it this way? What about Microsoft Teams? What about this? What about that? How do we do it this way? What if we do one, then this, and then that what's the for how would you begin that and because you're in the midst of it right now and you're almost done centralizing, which I like we like to say unification UCAs, but you're almost done centralizing. Why would we centralize, by the way, don't we want to unit. Don't we want a kind of universal like we don't want to centralize, do we? Or do we want to really? Don't we want to be able to like make changes and ma. Move add change requests non central like anywhere. That's a. Don't let me let my brain, don't let my brain take us off topic here. But where would you begin with that project?
• 35:29
  Speaker B: Yeah. So I mean not, not to nitpick on words, you know, centralization is not the best terminology, but it's what I use because for me, my administration is in a web portal. For me it's centralized. I have access to it.
• 35:44
  Speaker A: Dare we say single pane of glass.
• 35:47
  Speaker B: We can't say, okay, we could do that.
• 35:48
  Speaker A: No, no, don't. I hate that term. But people say anyways, go.
• 35:54
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I would, I would, you know, I would certainly ask the organization, you know, what is your ecosystem? You know, are you a Microsoft shop? Or you know, are you, are you married to Google or whatever. But the second follow, follow up question is do you think that may change anytime soon?
• 36:17
  Speaker A: Change is inevitable. Change is inevitable. But if you're a Microsoft shop, chances are you're a Microsoft shop. Are you listening, Bill Gates? Are you listening, Bill Gates? And everyone on LinkedIn that is owned by Microsoft. If you're with Microsoft, you're with Microsoft. Although I do know someone that migrated a ridiculous number of users. But we won't talk about that. Yeah, keep going.
• 36:38
  Speaker B: I know a couple of companies that have said, you know what, I've had it up to here. And they moved away.
• 36:45
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 36:45
  Speaker B: So I mean it happens. But then the second question is, do you want your product to be to streamline in with Microsoft or would you prefer it to be independent because that can position you to be more agile in the future.
• 37:03
  Speaker A: Do you really think a massive enterprise company would not want unified unification with Microsoft though?
• 37:08
  Speaker B: I think it depends on the culture.
• 37:10
  Speaker A: Okay, let's just say the culture is, no, we want to be with Microsoft. We definitely want integration with Microsoft. We're a teams organization. Everyone chats on teams, everyone uses teams where don't take my Excel away, don't do this. But we've got all these crappy phone systems and the Problem is Nebraska. The problem is always Nebraska. Okay. Or it's South Dakota or Iowa. Yes. Or it's, I don't know, some weird area in Montana. Or it's, you know. Yeah. I don't know, the outskirts of Amarillo, Texas.
• 37:51
  Speaker B: So what are you hinting at here? Number portability?
• 37:55
  Speaker A: I'm hinting at maybe we don't have good Internet or maybe. Okay, number portability. Could be one. But that's rare. It's very rare.
• 38:06
  Speaker B: I've run into it three or four times. Times already?
• 38:08
  Speaker A: Yes. Three or four times. In a lifetime?
• 38:11
  Speaker B: No, in the last year and a half.
• 38:13
  Speaker A: Okay, then it's. It does.
• 38:15
  Speaker B: I mean, it really is the cornfields of Iowa. So, I mean, if you're not in, you know, if you're not building your manufacturing plants in low labor geography, low cost labor geography in the cornfields of Iowa, then you probably don't have an issue with that.
• 38:31
  Speaker A: That's the problem. So that's one of the problems, is locations. In other words, in location. Internet.
• 38:38
  Speaker B: Sure.
• 38:39
  Speaker A: Right. So there's just no fiber there yet. We're back to T1s. And T1s are okay, I guess. I mean, it's just funny that we're. We're. We've come full circle and we're back to. We're back to your nightmare story of, yeah, we gotta bring a T1 in to run what team's voice. And then people are like, it ain't. Don't fix it. What's the point? Well, the. So we're a modern company and we need to be unified. That's what. That's why.
• 39:08
  Speaker B: So. So let me recount a story I had with a director literally last week. All of us are on a video call now. Think about the payload that comes with video. We're all on a video call. And he says, and so we're evaluating. We're doing what we call the cut sheet. Right. We're evaluating his site.
• 39:29
  Speaker A: Love the cut sheets.
• 39:31
  Speaker B: Yeah. And so, you know, we did a data dump of the old aviap. And it had, you know, 80. 80 rows. So he had like, you know, 80 telephones on his old system. And he's like, we don't need this anymore. Phone calls are not a critical part of my operation. But we need, you know, phones for 911 and production and this and that. So at the end of the day, he needs like 25 phones. And he says, okay, Darren. Yeah, this is the final cut sheet. You know, we're kind of good to go. But I'm not going to let you install voip yet. And I'm kind of using his words, right? I'm not going to let you install voip yet. And I'm like, okay, what's your concern? And he goes, well, our Internet's not very good and we're all on a video call.
• 40:18
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 40:19
  Speaker B: And so I said, you do realize that this video is taking up a whole lot more bandwidth than a 32k phone call.
• 40:30
  Speaker A: Well, no, he doesn't. He doesn't realize, gosh darn it, where's your empathy? Where's your.
• 40:38
  Speaker B: So I wasn't. And don't get me wrong, I wasn't quite as snarky with him. So anyway, I kind of broke it down a little bit, and I'm like, look, these days, you know, we prioritize our conversations and, you know, we know how to streamline this for you. So it's going to be a smooth transition. It's a very, very lightweight. And so I kind of do the math for him. And anyway, I alleviated his concerns and he understood. So, you know, because at the end of the day, I got him to realize that, you know, when he has these video calls with his teams, he's got, you know, 18 or 20 people all on video calls in the office.
• 41:26
  Speaker A: So how many, how many PBXs would you say that you had disparate PBXs in your environment before you centralized?
• 41:40
  Speaker B: That's a great question, because when I, when I put a bow on this project, I'm going to go back and pull some numbers.
• 41:46
  Speaker A: Over a hundred.
• 41:47
  Speaker B: How many systems did I move and then how many different types of systems? You know, how do we want to define that? Because I had, you know, Avaya System 75s, you know, all the way up to Communication Manager 5.2, I think. I don't think we had anything newer than that by the time I tackled the project. But I would say at least a good. Off top of my head, different brand names, I'm sure.
• 42:16
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's just 35. How many. 35 different brand names. How.
• 42:21
  Speaker B: Well, at least.
• 42:23
  Speaker A: What kind of savings and efficiencies were gained, do you think? And you laugh, but why wait? My question is, again, I think that.
• 42:37
  Speaker B: Is a great point.
• 42:39
  Speaker A: I spoke with this on another episode. Okay, so I had. So what happened during COVID you had a lot of people. And I said on the last episode, you had a lot of people just click the button. Like IT managers just clicked the button and they just, just voice enabled their team. They just voice enabled Teams, they literally clicked the button and started paying $8 for their little phone system skew and another $12 prefer voice enabling team. Some of them even had Internet. I think this guy had international as well. And I had a large not need to mention campus style organization with it was. I may could have been 60,000 licenses that voice enabled at least $20 per license. That's 60,000. I'm doing this math again because this is similar to the reentering the Earth's orbit at 37,000ft per second times $20 is $1.2 million a month. $1.2 million a month when we could have just, you know, I don't know, done something called direct routing and you know, something called, you know, I don't know, separate voice call paths versus individual one on one Microsoft Teams voice enablement but still have all of your. And we could have probably paid $50,000 a month versus 1.2 million a month. So there's a huge savings there. But at the end of the day when Instead of paying $1.2 million a month, instead of paying $50,000 a month, they said no, screw it, we're going to pay 1.2 million a month because we don't want to do that right now.
• 44:19
  Speaker B: Right? We don't want to do that right now.
• 44:21
  Speaker A: So you.
• 44:21
  Speaker B: We don't, we don't have the bandwidth.
• 44:23
  Speaker A: So I'll tell you, we'll pay 1.2 million. Excuse me, please pay me and five other people. We'll take that $1.2 million. I'll bring five guys in, we'll hire five guys, pay us 1.2 million for two months. You don't have to pay for 12 months. Just pay us for two months, 1.2 million and we'll take.
• 44:43
  Speaker B: Let me put it to you, let me put it to you this way. Without giving you precise numbers. My budget this year is now 31% of what it was only a few years back.
• 44:57
  Speaker A: So they gave you a bonus, of course.
• 45:00
  Speaker B: You're funny.
• 45:02
  Speaker A: It's like when I, the reason why I quit my retail job back in the day is because we absolutely blew this little like, like sales contest. It was. I worked at Starbucks, okay, let's just face it, okay? That's the truth. I worked at Starbucks. We had a machine sale. I said why don't we just try. We'll just to put a little effort into it, do a little sales training with the guys, we'll warm up all the machines, we'll sell a bunch of espresso machines. I Taught my. I went and bought this thing called Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar at the bookstore. I taught all my baristas how to do a demo on an espresso machine. And then, you know, we asked everyone if they wanted their drink for free. And then we made it on the espresso machine in the store. And then we said, so do you want the stainless steel or the copper? And they laughed and they said, no way. I'm not buying that. It's way too expensive. And I said, well, yeah, but just do a return on investment form. How many times did you come into Starbucks? Oh, you come in twice a day. Oh, my. And then my husband comes in twice a day, and, oh, then my kids. Oh, you pay 600amonth in Starbucks. 300. The average person spends like 300 to 600amonth at Starbucks. That's a Mercedes. The machine pays for itself. Just come in half the time and have a Starbucks at home. They're like, okay, we sold. We blew it out of the water. I mean, we sold like $30,000 worth or $70,000 worth of espresso machines in a couple weeks, like three weeks. And they're like, congratulations, here is your 50 gift certificate. 50 gift certificate. Yeah. No one's heard that story before, but. So, of course, I mean, you got bonus for saving for, you know, dropping the budget by 66%. What's the point?
• 46:27
  Speaker B: You would. You would think. You would think. Now, some of the benefits that came out of that exercise, it isn't just reducing the phone bills, you know, it's identifying a lot of other opportunities. Oh, we've closed the site. We've moved this site. Oh, you know, AT&T is still billing us at, you know, these other, you know, 18 closed sites. Or now that we're looking at the bills more closely. Wait a minute. We're not getting our. You know, the rate that we negotiated on these circuits. There's so many other benefits. One of the other projects that I thoroughly enjoyed was.
• 47:02
  Speaker A: It's true. There's a lot of stupid stuff out there. I look at people and I say, all you need to do. I'm not. I. I'm. I'm not gonna charge you anything. This is part of. Please just promote my podcast and tell everyone to listen to it. If you get on a phone call with me for 15 minutes and you bring all your bills to the phone call, I absolutely guarantee you. And this is for. Only for my IT directors that have. That been on the show and this type of stuff. I Guarantee you I will blow your mind and show you some very stupid stuff. It's just people don't do it. They don't have the time to do it because we're all managing fires. We're back into the forest fire again. We're just putting out the fires that are burning our leg. And AT&T is laughing because they're still charging you. And they know that. They're not laughing. They're just waiting for you to say, hey, raise your hand and say, can you charge me less? Oh, yeah, okay, sure.
• 47:56
  Speaker B: Right, right. Yeah.
• 47:58
  Speaker A: Again, we pick a lot on AT. We're picking a lot on AT&T. I'm sorry, ATT. I do love you for things that you do. And yes, we have a. Yes, there's a ton of AT&T fiber circuits out there. And one thing that you do very, very well is you freaking install them pretty darn quickly. Unless there's an issue, you install fiber circuits. In my opinion, my, my personal opinion, what I've seen faster than I would say everybody, but go ahead.
• 48:25
  Speaker B: If, if a company decides to migrate their infrastructure, you know, their legacy infrastructure over to a cloud based solution, one thing they're going to discover are all of the other unexpected benefits, you know, such as identifying lines that you're paying for but aren't physically connected to your pbx. Some of those might be fire alarms and that sort of thing. Those are going to have to be addressed. You know, the analog services are being replaced or being retired, you know, one or the other. So there's a lot of other opportunities out there that, you know, those pots, a lot of my POTS lines right now that I'm in the middle of replacing, I can't replace them fast enough. They're $1,400 a month now. You remember when a Pods line was $15 a month?
• 49:15
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a stupid thing.
• 49:18
  Speaker B: I love fourteen hundred dollars. The.
• 49:21
  Speaker A: I have some really good POTS line guys. POTS line, plain old telephone line people out there. I have a lot of guys that just, that's all they specialize in. Hey, give me your spreadsheet of POTS lines. And we'll just, you know, we'll convert them to a different billing structure and then we'll help you convert the ones that are like just being turned on. Windstream was great for just saying, hey, we're cutting you off. Yep, done. And, or, or not saying we're cutting you off. And then just one day they stopped working.
• 49:49
  Speaker B: Right. One thing they'll all do is you need a POTS Line for say a burglar alarm system. You're going to get that POTS line with all of the extras tacked onto it. You're going to get voicemail on it. You're going to get three way calling call forwarding features that you don't need. Oh, remember Centrix non published listings?
• 50:12
  Speaker A: You got any Centrix lines out there?
• 50:14
  Speaker B: Oh yeah, I still have a lot of centrics.
• 50:16
  Speaker A: What was that other thing? The ring? I'll think of it in a second. Oh, well. So to not diverge too much, what was the. If you look back at your centralization project of taking over 35 different providers and hundreds of different PBXs and centralizing them and cutting your budget back by 66%, what else did you know, notice? What was that budget, by the way? Are you allowed to say that or no?
• 50:43
  Speaker B: I could share with you privately. It's in the millions easily. Well, well, well. In the millions. Tens of millions.
• 50:49
  Speaker A: Okay, tens of millions cut down by 2/3.
• 50:52
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And here's the funny thing. Our executive leadership still recently brought in a third party auditor and they're going through all of the, you know, Internet circuits and that sort of thing.
• 51:10
  Speaker A: Sounds like a circus provider.
• 51:11
  Speaker B: The wire, wireline and mobility carousel or.
• 51:17
  Speaker A: Anyways, I'm not gonna. Anyways, keep going.
• 51:20
  Speaker B: So, yeah, anyway, they're finding everything on the. A lot of opportunities on the data side, but they're not finding much on voice, just some.
• 51:29
  Speaker A: Again, I don't know, we'll do that for free. Those guys take money for that stuff.
• 51:34
  Speaker B: They absolutely do. Yeah. 25% is kind of the industry average.
• 51:39
  Speaker A: Yeah. Cool. That sounds like fun. If I have a little bit of a bias towards RFPs and waiting and stuff like that, I do think there's a place for them. I do think it's helpful in certain places, but I also think it's handicapping certain areas as well. Is there, should RFPs be as strict as they are, should they be more flexible or when you do an rfp, rfp, are people looking at them? And because I know that a lot of providers will look at an RFP and they'll just say, no, screw this, I'm not answering this and have fun. Everybody else and you may actually miss a vendor that would be a better fit for your company or a better provider for your company, but they're just not going to play that stupid. We have to answer every thousand line item on this RFP and respond to this because you almost have to have a professional person to respond to RFPs. Sometimes to even kind of get in that game. And I think there's a, a negative, at least in the government world, I think with the whole 8A and the government bid boards and stuff like that, and Having lived in D.C. for a while, there's a just kind of a negative connotation when it comes to RFPs and responding to them.
• 52:49
  Speaker B: Right. Yeah. I think they should be customized because an RFP for say, a healthcare system, you know, is going to be very different than somebody in automotive manufacturing.
• 53:02
  Speaker A: No, for sure we're going to write this RFP and someone's going to have to reply to it, but they may not be able to hit every bullet point.
• 53:08
  Speaker B: I think there's nothing wrong with an rfp being just two to three pages. It doesn't have to be 37.
• 53:14
  Speaker A: General overview. Gotcha. General overview. Yeah, because I've been, I've written RFPs for people before, but I leave it a little bit flexible so that you can get providers that. Well, we don't do it this way, we actually do it this way. So it's a little bit different, if that makes sense.
• 53:28
  Speaker B: But there's certainly some value in it. It, you know, to allow you to compare three different, you know, providers and, you know, look at it through, you know, apples to apples.
• 53:43
  Speaker A: No, the scoring is very important. The scoring of an RP is important. Well, this has been very fun. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or a piece of advice that you have to any IT leaders out there or people out there, infrastructure leaders, network guys? What's your number one piece of advice that you would have for someone?
• 54:03
  Speaker B: I would say don't lose sight of the big picture. Most of us in IT support are not a profit center unless we're, you know, Salesforce or Facebook or Amazon. We're not technology companies. We're here to support the business. And unfortunately, a lot of my colleagues tend to lose sight of that. And as a result, they feel like they need to tell the business exactly how to, how to run the business. And that's really not the case. As a cost center, we're here to support the business. And I like to think of it, you know, our creed should be the three Ps. The first is preservation, preserve data. And I know this is we're in the telecom world, but there's a lot of data in the telecom world. You know, a lot of times we might retain a lot of customer client information in those phone calls that we capture. The second one is presentation. We're here to make the lives of our colleagues easier. We're here to help the business be streamlined and more efficient. Does that make sense?
• 55:15
  Speaker A: It's. It's true. I mean, I believe all these things help the company make more money. So I just disagree with the cost center thing a little bit. It because the old mantra is that it is only a cost center and that we don't help make the company money, when in reality there's this whole thing called digital transformation going on right now. All of that helps the company be more efficient. And you just got done saying that we cut our budget by two thirds. So yes, that's saving money. Yes, yes, that's taking the cost center and making it better. But at the end of the day, like you said, there's all the extra things that people then recognize that might help them be more efficient and do their job better. So to a degree, there's not a single aspect of the company, there's not one department in the company that doesn't do their job better without technology.
• 56:01
  Speaker B: Yeah, completely agree with you. And I guess what rubs me the wrong way, this is maybe a pet peeve of mine, is, you know, some of the attitudes that I see along among some of my colleagues. You know, I think it's kind of important to understand that, you know, we are essentially we're servants supporting the business in a support role. And so when they ask a question, we need to be there to help collaborate with them and provide those. And so for me, it's more of an attitude than anything else. So, you know, partnership. Absolutely. So, you know, the three my three Ps are, you know, preservation of data, right? Yeah, and presentation of data, trying to make things easier and then production, automation. We do need to don a business hat and understand the business side of the house and then look for, you know, areas where we might have redundancy or opportunities for automation, that sort of thing.
• 57:09
  Speaker A: And perfect.
• 57:10
  Speaker B: You know, just because we're in telecom doesn't mean that. That that really doesn't apply, because it does.
• 57:16
  Speaker A: Oh, it absolutely does. And even saying telecom, it's not even really like a term anymore. It's like technology, because telecoms like voice and data and numerous other things that are all unified one, and you end up talking about APIs and software development and all these other things. If I want to offer this, and if Anyone out there, IT directors that are working, VPs of IT, IT director, CTO, CIO, if there's anyone out there that would, like, like myself and Darren, to help you evaluate your pile of crap, aka bills, telecom bills, multiple PBXs that might still be out there. Comm dials, Merlin and a Merlin magic. I just thought of that one.
• 58:03
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 58:03
  Speaker A: You know, whatever it is, you're unhappy with your VOIP provider. You're trying to microwave, you know, you're trying to figure out how do we migrate all this junk to teams? What about all of our stuff? And in Iowa and Nebraska and in the middle of, you know, nowhere, how do we do all of that? If you would like to get on a 30 to 45 minute call with me and Darren and have us help you with that, all you have to do is DM one of us here on. On. On, you know, LinkedIn, or get a hold of us via the podcast. There's a lot of different ways you can get a hold of myself and the team and we'll help you. You map that out. Sound like fun?
• 58:41
  Speaker B: Absolutely.
• 58:42
  Speaker A: All right. Thank you so much for being on the show. It's been.
• 58:46
  Speaker B: Thanks for having.
• 58:47
  Speaker A: Been talking about doing this for a while and we. We could probably just talk more horror stories and it be a lot of fun, you know, like being down for a week without any phone calls.
• 58:55
  Speaker B: Yeah, I probably have a few more dozen stories I could share with you.
• 58:59
  Speaker A: All right, thank you.
• 58:59
  Speaker B: S.